What it must have been like to live in the Middle Ages. Though it’s often unfairly caricatured as a time when people knew nothing, there is a case to be made that these times were very different – a time when humanity was in its childhood.

The people of these times knew nothing much about nature, so they relied on stories and myths to explain it all. Religion was all powerful. Anyone who could set themselves apart as a mystic – who could somehow claim to know the unknowable – had a certain advantage over others. It explains why religion and power went hand in hand over the centuries and across so many cultures. The need to understand what was hidden from us provided a great market opportunity for charlatans and storytellers of all hues.

People were at the whim of natural forces in a way we find it difficult to fathom today. Storms, earthquakes and floods could take away your livelihood. A disease could wipe out your family overnight. Bad weather could cause great famine and wipe out communities. People lived their lives at the behest of forces they knew nothing about.

During medieval times, you could play the cynic and state that all things were unknowable. The systems of thought to pursue knowledge were in their infancy, so often truth boiled down to who told the best story and who had greater authority and power. Ultimately, everything was an opinion back then. Unless you were in some sort of technical area, building castles, bridges, mills or weapons of war, nobody knew anything.

Ultimately, the technicians won out, and the same processes of trial and error used by them started to be applied to all sorts of questions about the universe. Knowledge, now substantiated by experiment and evidence, got elevated over mere opinion. It was no longer so easy to play the cynic. We discovered that certain things were knowable. It wasn’t necessary to fall back on comforting fairytales anymore. We could use our newfound knowledge to create objects not found in nature, and to apply these to our own purposes. Today, planes fly above us, we can chat comfortably with someone in another part of the world, there is plenty of food on our tables and we have a better chance than ever to live healthily into old age.

The knowledge that supports this is often arcane. It involves particles traveling at light speeds, enormous nuclear forces, complex molecules performing coordinated activities, and mathematical formulas being played out billions of times simultaneously. There are no more simple stories to explain everything in our world. It’s just too complicated. Instead, we depend on lots of expertise and deep knowledge from specialists in their narrow, focused areas, often themselves relying on massive computers to grasp what’s going on. No one person can possibly understand in detail all there is to know.

We’re now in a place where the knowledge is available to explain many of the things we thought were mystical, but most of us have only the most tenuous understanding of it, if we understand it at all. Science has moved on, but our minds remain medieval. This is what we see when people deny evolution or global warming or vaccines, or they claim the earth is flat. They don’t understand the science or they refuse to understand, so they rebel against it.

We need to redouble our efforts to explain science, support science education and foster careers in science, otherwise our world could relapse into medievalism rather quickly, and we will be left alone in our caves, cursing the stormy night.